Is this normal at 10 months? My son will wake up about 1am, and then be WIDE AWAKE for around two hours. He cries v noisily if I try to rock him, or put him in the cot. The only thing that keeps him quiet now is nursing but that isn't as effective as it used to be.
He's got quite clingy in the daytime and is v frustrated at not being able to crawl. Is that connected? I work from home while his Dad looks after him most of the day. Is he making up for lack of Mummy time in the day? He got over a crap cold a week ago which may have disrupted things. Or is this just to be expected at his age?
If it's a short term phase I could manage it by going to bed v early but starting to feel a bit desperate!
Please or to access all these features
Please
or
to access all these features
Join our Sleep forum for tips on creating a sleep routine for your baby or toddler.
Sleep
Just a phase? 10 month old AWAKE 2 hours in the night
27 replies
FreelanceMama · 12/11/2012 02:35
OP posts:
McPhee ·
12/11/2012 03:30
My Dd has recently decided that 3 am is a bloody good time of the night for a poo, a play, a tantrum, a feed and likes to take as long about it as she ruddy well likes 
Last night we were an hour and a half, and tonight's not looking any quicker. She's currently rolling about the bed, squealing to her hearts content, at the beauty of her feet 
I admit, they are darn cute, but I'd much rather see their beauty during day light 
I feel your pain!
FreelanceMama ·
12/11/2012 11:19
Just been to see the Health Visitor this morning. She checked out our bedtime routine, and daytime routine and thought it was all good. She said if you can rule out illness and teething pain then the two other causes could be hunger and habit.
She suggested we try increasing his food intake during the day: offer more at the three meals (we're letting him self-feed so he can stop when he's full but we rarely have any leftover so at the risk of throwing food away I'm going to offer him more at mealtimes.). Also suggested we incorporate mid-morning and mid-afternoon snacks: toast and hummous, ricecakes, baby biscuits, etc. She even said cake!
The other suggestion was to make nightime as boring as possible - avoid eye-contact, nursing, talking, etc. so there's no incentive to stay awake. And do some gentle controlled crying (shudder). All she recommended was going in after two minutes, comforting (pick up or leaning over and patting), then leaving the room, back again after two minutes, and repeat, and repeat, and repeat....and try this for a few days in a row.
My partner and I are a bit over the likelihood of this working because he won't be comforted by patting or picking up a lot of the time, but we think we'll give it a go at the weekend when we can catch up with sleep during the day if needed.
However, I just read "I've tried everything! Nothing works! Help!" part of the No-Cry Sleep Solution (p.209) and she has three ideas that are worth trying, if you're at your wits' end and one step away from completely losing the plot.:
- take a break - do anything you can to clear the sleep debt a bit so you're in a better mental shape to cope. For us this means me going to bed at 8pm.
- get serious about tackling it - have a plan, stick to the plan. For us this means taking feeding him a lot in the day seriously, and doing all we can to have him rested by bedtime.
- a last resort gentler version of controlled crying - if you want details, send me a message and I'll summarise it for you.
OP posts:
FreelanceMama ·
06/12/2012 10:54
Four weeks later and we have some progress...Tuesday night he was wide awake from 2.30am to 4.30am 
but then last night I didn't have to go to him until he got up for the day at 6.15am this morning. For the first time ever. 
The difference between the two days is that yesterday he had no sleep during the day until about 2pm when he zonked out in my arms for 45mins, and then we took him swimming. He normally falls asleep on the way back but this time we went to the supermarket and that perked him up. Tea and bath a bit later than normal, very quick bedtime routine, and then fed very quickly to sleep. So...we'll see what happens when we go swimming next week. If it leads to a good night again, then he's going to the pool every afternoon!
OP posts:
DeckTheHallsWithBartimaeus ·
11/12/2012 14:31
DS had many phases like this - but he did stop eventually! He is an awful sleeper but I did manage to identify some causes :
- Reflux (unfortunately this was a big problem for us until we got his meds sorted at 12 months)
- Developmental phases : he went from doing nothing at 5 months to walking at 10 - so learnt to roll, sit up, commando crawl, crawl, stand up, cruise and walk in just 5 months. We had some awful nights as he would sleep-do whatever he was learning.
- Teething : his first 7 teeth never caused him too much pain, just niggly pain I think as he'd just lie awake for hours, not crying unless I left him. But not going to sleep either
- Sleeping too well - oh yes! Once I managed to get him to only wake once or twice a night he started either waking very early or staying awake for a couple of hours in the night as he'd already slept 7 or 8 hours straight which was amazing for him, so he was already really rested (IYSWIM)
Andrea Grace's sleep method really helped us. Went from having a BF baby who could only ever BF to sleep, to a baby who night-weaned without crying once, because we'd already installed the idea of going to sleep by himself in his cot (and we upped his milk intake in the day which helped a lot).
vix206 ·
11/12/2012 16:21
Not what you want to hear I'm sure but my 27 month old DS still has nights like this!
Don’t want to miss threads like this?
Weekly
Sign up to our weekly round up and get all the best threads sent straight to your inbox!
Log in to update your newsletter preferences.
You've subscribed!
Please create an account
To comment on this thread you need to create a Mumsnet account.